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Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics ran independently from 1977 to 1993. Each issue focused on a different topic such as food, theater, or ecology. Between the covers you’ll find photography, film stills, sculptures, paintings, poems, prose, memoirs, collage, and documentations of performance art. Contributors included Harmony Hammond, Ida Applebroog, May Stevens, Mary Beth Edelson, Sally Webster, and Amy Sillman.

Here is the homepage for the 2009 documentary on Heresies called “The Heretics”, directed by Joan Braderman. The site includes an index to the articles.

We have 24 of the 27 issues of Heresies in our back stacks. Come explore them.

FiberArts features contemporary artists who work with fabric, weaving, sewing, dyes, textiles, embroidery, crochet, knitting, needlework and soft sculpture in order to produce works that boast both fine craftsmanship and fine art. Although expression and decoration with textiles is ancient, it was only fairly recently accepted in the fine arts world. The fibers revolution of the 1960’s led to a huge number of artists, both men and women, exploring and experimenting in a medium which was once labeled “women’s work” or pushed aside from the arts scene as mere craft.

In the library you will find 122 Issues of FiberArts from 1979 to the Summer 2011 issue, which was sadly the last.

American Fabrics and Fashion (also called American Fabrics) was a commercial textile magazine created as a guide for manufacturers in the fabrics industry. In every issue there are dozens of physical fabric samples glued in, so in case you were wondering, “What did the 50’s feel like?”, here is the most literal answer to your question. Accompanying the samples are textile advertisements and sometimes the samples are even incorporated into the ads themselves. For anyone interested in fashion, textiles or all that is tactile, American Fabrics is a publication of great cultural and historical value.

Originally a magazine covering performance art, over time it gradually shifted its editorial focus from art that was formally adventurous to art that was socially and culturally adventurous. Back issues of the magazine can still be seen at better libraries around the world. The High Performance archive is in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles (Art in the Public Interest website, accessed 12/18/2013).

In the SVA library, by definition, one of the better, you’ll find all but a few issues of High Performance, 64 in total, from the 2nd issue (1978) to the 76th and final issue (1997).

Accessible in print at the SVA Library and electronically for SVA students via Art Source (MySVA username and password required), Jenni Sorkin’s article in Art Journal, “Envisioning High Performance“ chronicles High Performance’s history and lasting influence, and provides this description of the magazine’s format for the first five years of its existence:

With the commencement of High Performance, publisher, founder, and editor Linda Frye Burnham invented a standard format for the documentation and dissemination of live and ephemeral artworks, creating single- or double-paged spreads that paired a photograph with an artist-supplied text chronicling the live event. Operating on an open submission policy from its founding in 1978 until 1982, Burnham published any artist who could provide black-and-white photographic documentation, dates, and a description of the performance (Sorkin).

Itwas important in terms of documentation, ensuring that these performance art pieces, which often only occurred once, could have a life beyond the memories of a small audience that happened to witness them. It also helped define and lend credence to a genre of art that was not receiving serious critical attention, not least of all because the lack of documentation. High Performance helped define performance art both by what it published and also with what it didn’t. By “rejecting outright the inclusion of dance, theater, and music, HP delineated clear boundaries by determining what was not performance art” (Sorkin). Among many other, artists featured include Carolee Schneeman, Pat Oleszko, The Waitresses, Paul McCarthy, Kim Jones, Linda Montano, and Barbara T. Smith.

Please enjoy the following sample from the pages of:

High Performance, no 20. 1983.

High Performance, no 21. 1983.

High Performance, no 25. 1984. Back Cover.Anne Bean’s “The Fall of Babylon”. Photos by Chris Bishop.

Johanna Went. Photo by Anna BarradoHigh Performance, no 28. 1984.

“Orbit on the Hour” by Yura Adams. Photo by Kim McLean.High Performance, no 22. 1983.

“Dermoid” by Nancy Forest Brown.High Performance, no 14. Summer 1981.

Carolee Schneemann. Photo by James Tenney.High Performance, no 20. 1983.